If you've tried to read an article at sites like Washington Post, Medium, Bloomberg, Los Angeles Times, Wired, Vanity Fair or the Wall Street Journal, you've probably run into a paywall. A paywall restricts access to content by requiring a paid subscription; Sometimes after giving you a few free articles.
You should pay if you are using them frequently or for work, but for an article once or twice a month it doesn't make sense.

Here are some notes from David McRitchie in Sept 2021.
See my notes from 2020 below


So far the best to ward off paywalls that I have come up with lets the site start out with JavaScript enabled to get past the first check then does not let the webpage use JavaScript..

Paywall circumvention (MIT Tech Review, NYTimes, Washington Post among others) So far the easiest to use method is as follows, adblockers just don't do it anymore. When this fails go back to deleting site cookies.

Turn off Javascript for the site: (lose images on Windows for WaPo)


David McRitchie

Just sent this to a few programmers to test, and find a troublesome paywall site. When I find the 50 or more newspapers that use the same or similar I'll include the link. But for now unless you live in California you are not likely to run past the paywall limit after being directed from Google results. I'll include Mac directions if the same works and you give instructions. I don't have the newer Firefox versions on this computer and Microsoft update did in the two smaller laptops. Actually I do have Firefox on Android, and just checked don't see anything similar in settings not even on the medallion left of the url in the address bar, guess they figure private browsing is the answer (I don't), Temporary containers extension. The other browsers are Chromium browsers so should be same as Chrome.


My old 2020 notes
There are a few ways around paywalls.

Paywall Extension- Chrome Web Store
Cookie Deleter Extension - Chrome Web Store
Unpaywall - Chrome Web Store
Unpaywall - Chrome Web Store
How to Bypass Paywalls at Popular News Sites | Gizmo's Freeware
GitHub - iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-chrome: Bypass Paywalls web browser extension for Chrome and Firefox. Links:

last updated 18 Jan 2014